Booting large images on iMX.8-evk board

[Chris Hofer]

Hi everyone,

I recently wanted to test the Armv8 virtualization introduced in the 
19.11 release on hardware. I ran into a limitation of the preinstalled 
u-boot on the i.MX8-evk board.

After I loaded the uImage to a reasonable address (e.g. 0x60000000), I 
executed it with bootm 0x60000000. However, the preinstalled u-boot 
refused to execute it, since a config-parameter (CONFIG_SYS_BOOTM_LEN) 
limits the max. size of a bootable image and mine was too large.

Stefan confirmed this issue and pointed me to position [1] in the 
release notes 20.02; it shows how to build a modified u-boot version 
without this (and other) limitation(s) and flash it to an SD card. Once 
u-boot is on the card, one may have to change the default boot-mode of 
the board from internal flash to SD card, by changing the boot mode pads 
on the board according to [2].

I just wanted to share this with you, in case you run into the same issue.


Best,

Chris Hofer


[1] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/20.02#USB_and_Input

[2] https://community.nxp.com/docs/DOC-343178